I am completely bowled over by the wonderful gift Lee made me for our 15th wedding anniversary. It may be “only” 15 years, but we’re very pleased to have had such a great time in our late-life relationship.
I’d been seeing Lee messing around on his computer a lot lately and I was really wondering why he was putting so many photos of birds in his journal. It’s not that he doesn’t like birds, but he’s not crazy about them like I am.
I knew he’s been practicing book binding and has bound a couple of books he wrote and plans to bind recent journals. On top of that he’d asked me a few questions about my own journal. But I didn’t think anything of it until he spilled the beans that he was making me a journal for an anniversary gift!
There is a great deal of hand work involved in book binding. Lee decided to tell me what he was doing so he could hang out with me while he hand sewed all the signatures (units of a certain number of pages) together. Otherwise I wouldn’t have seen him last weekend. He sewed it with red thread, too. I like red.
I’d have been impressed just with a blank book, having watched how hard it is to press all the pages together, create the cover (with genuine book cloth), and affix the cover to the book (I think that’s the actual binding part—gee, I worked for a book publisher in my twenties and still don’t know all the terms).
But no, he made a bullet journal with dots on the pages, a pretty place to write headings, and lovely images on each page, which he cut with his scary killer paper cutter to go all the way to the edges.
And it has a cute title page. It’s really a labor of love, which I truly appreciate. It means SO much to me to get a handmade gift, especially one so carefully thought out. I’m going to use it as a bird journal, so it will be in use a long time.
What did I get him? I also gave him his gift early. It was a bunch of tasteful linen book cloth from a library supply company. I guess we were thinking along the same lines.
Lee got a really good new printer that will print in high quality on large paper, so now he’s working on book sleeves. I just want to print horse pictures, of course.
Daily Bird
I thought I was going to have to do the cranes again, because until late in the evening the only birds I’d heard or seen were dozens and dozens of them. The day had started out very windy and cold, so no one was flitting about.
But, as I was putting Apache’s saddle away and listening to cranes, I heard something else interesting. I started the Merlin app and finished what I was doing and let the horses out of their pens.
I was right! I was hearing owls. Multiple owls. Great horned owls! The only known predators of the barred owls who are usually here! Where did all these owls come from? I don’t have an answer, but this was my first time hearing them here. They make the “normal” hoo-hoo owl sound, among others.
To add to the wonder of the evening, all the black vultures started heading to their roosts for the night. There were 25 I counted. It was lucky that the wind had died down and there was no traffic noise from FM 485 for once. I could hear their wings beating. I love that sound.
The Hermits' Rest 